Monday Story # 6: Adrift

July 24th, 2012, somewhere in the Indian Ocean

The sun had burned them for days and weeks, reflecting double off the bright white of the lifeboat's hull, baking the two men inside. The heat turned pale skin pink, red, dark red, olive and - finally - a deep copper-brown. The younger man claimed to have been a priest back in the world. The older, a sailor. Only one of them could recall actually boarding the tiny craft. The priest was called Jason Pettine. He told the Sailor about boarding the smuggler ship called Wendigo some three weeks ago. He was expected - he claimed – at a coastal mission 80 miles north of Cape Horn. The older man nodded approval at this, offered no reply beyond:

I’m not expected anywhere.

They found a first aid kit and rations in a hidden compartment under the forward port side. In it, there were three gallons of water, Rice cakes wrapped in plastic, freeze dried strawberries, a carton of chocolates, and a fifth of Jim Beam. There were bandages, and medical tape. There was a jar of Cipro, and a bottle of salt tablets.

***

July 25th, 2012

The Priest picked up his story at daybreak the next morning, neither man having slept. The holy man’s voice was dry and very low, and the sailor found himself understanding most, but not all, of the man’s monolog. He understood that The Wendigo was 90 feet from stem to stern, a destroyer class gun boat, decommissioned, and fitted as a smuggler. She’d gone down over a spot called The Spire, an underwater pillar of rock thousands of feet high, it’s deadly blade lurking just below the surface where the Indian Ocean meets the Atlantic.

Every soul aboard went down in the wreck.

The priest’s face was in spasm with the words, folding and constricting violently around a frowning mouth, as if the extra effort would somehow cool him, and expel the foul sunlight from his burning eyes. He went on, and again the Sailor had to concentrate in order to understand the man’s ruined voice. Apparently the Wendigo had been two weeks into a six - week voyage from Sri Lanka to New Zealand, when a sudden gale blew them into the shallows ten miles off of Cape Horn. The captain, a nasty, chronic alcoholic in the priest’s assessment, spent most of the voyage unconscious or heading that way. He was asleep the last time the priest had seen him, passed out on the floor of his cabin just before the Wendigo was gashed by the massive outcropping of stone.

The sailor told the priest his name was Cul.

Neither man had any real idea of how much time had passed. The priest kept saying they’d been adrift for months and more, while the other man sometimes thought days, or maybe a couple of weeks. Other times he could swear it’d been years. Whatever the length in days and weeks, it seemed to the sailor as if the sun had been roasting them for the duration. Nightfall, fog, rain, cloud-cover…All of it suspended in favor of ceaseless, punishing heat.

The companions spent the afternoon watching the sea twitch and flash under the lifeboat. Something was feeding below them in the dark.

July 26th, 2012

It won’t be long, priest.

The sailor spoke from lying on his back, eyes closed. The holy man did not answer. Neither of them had felt all that social after being broiled, frozen, and re-heated with each passing moon. The priest finally answered back:

My son, whatever awaits us is…

Damn you.

The Sailor had growled it, interrupted whatever the priest had been leading up to. The

priest:

I’m sorry?

You heard me. I say damn you, priest, damn your eyes and fuck your eyes. Damn your breath. Damn your soul. I would have you quiet.

Just then a gull landed on the bow, no more than a few feet from where the priest’s arms lay above his head in the bottom of the life boat. After a few minutes more, the foul thing took wing, neither man having anything to say about it. The days burned on.

***

July 27th, 2012

The next morning, Pettine, took up the narrative again, his voice much reduced to an almost inaudible hiss. The Sailor thought he detected a note of desperation as well, as if the tale was a long one, and the teller running out of time. By now it had become clear that it pained the priest, physically, just talking. He gathered that the priest had been sent to Sri Lanka from Rome, almost eight years ago, sent there as part of the Vatican mission in Southeast Asia.

After a two year retreat in Big Sur, California. They sent me to work in the hills, in a place called Pau’.

The sailor nodded, he knew the place. The priest went on:

There were maybe 200 hundred people there, living in seven villages. A few more – about 120 - lived higher, just below tree line. Locals called them “Inea”, the “Hill People”. One day, not long ago, one of them came down from his home, about seven miles above from Pau. His name was Avat Singh He drove in an old pickup truck, on spring-washed roads assumed to be impassable at that time of the year. He came in the middle of the night, the whole way bleeding from a bullet wound in his lower abdomen. He was dying already when he got into the car, yet there he was, two am, pounding at my door with one hand, and holding his guts in with the other. I heard blood in his whisper:

“The Cobra is on the move. The Cobra is coming.”

I woke the sisters from sleep, and they brought Ava downstairs to the basement, to tend them as best they could. Our nearest hospital was a day’s drive, two days on foot. It’s not a very good hospital.

The priest stopped then, to look out at what was happening in the sea around the boat. It began to bubble and roil, with silver-white flashes popping in the depths just below the boat. By this time, both men were well used to the idea of the predatory multitudes gliding underneath them. Each passing day the sea offered more unnerving evidence. Expecting these performances never lessened the dread it brought to the tiny boat. Both men were silent until the water stopped moving, and the priest took up his tale again:

I went house to house, up and down the streets, waking the families. Ava said the rebels were coming down from a place called Ocho Valle, camping the night a few miles away, and that they’d be here early in the morning. I was shivering with fear as I ran from door to door. I told them all to make their way to the church, and that I’d be there shortly.

When I got to the church it was five am, almost sunrise. Nobody knew why I’d summoned them but they’d all seen the quickness of my step, heard the urgency in my pleas. There was fear in that church, crowded in, super-heated like radiation in a melting reactor. The fear poisoned the air in the sub-basement, amongst children, mothers, and fathers. I quieted them as best I could and quickly told them what needed to be done and why it needed to happen so fast. Within a few minutes, I had herded all my people into the basement, then down one more level to an ancient root cellar, built below our little church 300 years ago. The locals claimed the site had been a butchery, and the cellar the killing floor and smoking chamber. I had rounded up one hundred people that I’d sworn to protect, and stuffed them into a hole in the ground after telling them their lives and the lives of their children were at stake. I waited for the sun, thinking about what it might bring. I was terrified.

That night brought terror and frozen misery. A squall had come upon them in the middle of the night, and both men felt certain the boat would capsize and they would drown.

***

July 28th, 2012

They were surprised, the next day, to find the boat had held them safe. Pettine in particular, seemed a new man, as he passed out the morning chocolate ration and salt pill. He smiled as he spoke, a renewed note of triumph in his voice:

Things are different in my part of the world. There’s been war in Southeast Asia since the French occupied and colonized there hundreds of years ago. The triumph of the communists in Viet Nam brought some stability for a while, but in the long run, all they accomplished was to take the killing and dying off the front pages of American newspapers. The party’s borderlands are unstable by nature, and Sri Lanka is by far the most violent and the most volatile. There’s no money there. There’s no budget to build infrastructure, no reason, really, for a government to seek the approval of citizens. None of them have money either, or possessions of any kind. In addition, the populace typically makes it’s home in small, village size groupings. There is no unity amongst them, and therefore not a great probability that they might band together. In Sri Lanka, the power to rule men comes to the one who can kill the most. Often it’s a question of funding. Sometimes it’s outside interests, CIA, Mossad, or whoever wants boots on the ground in Sri Lanka. And sometimes it’s a local who shoots his way out of the ghetto and doesn’t stop till he has a mansion, usually the mansion of the last guy to shoot his way to the top.

He continued:

Nuyen Ang was not in power when I first came to Sri Lanka, but during my time in Rome, I received constant news of his rise. He styled himself “The Cobra”. The army at his command was said to be over 100,000 strong, well - trained, and well - equipped. For the last two years, Ang has been engaged in an evil systematic terrorism perpetrated on his own people. He hunted and killed every single man and woman who ever had anything to do with the previous regime. He killed all of their children, burned all of their houses, hunted their families and raped their daughters and sons. The task of their elimination is apparently finished, and the Cobra has turned his attention to expansion. I’d heard, in the weeks before I left, that it was his idea to take every village, hamlet, every hut and tent between his stronghold in the north and the sea. I knew that meant our little place would soon fall, even so, I found myself shocked when that day finally came.

The priest waited a long time here, before speaking again:

By the time I closed the rotted plywood door to the root cellar, everyone in the village knew what was at stake. Every day, for what had seemed weeks, a new atrocity-rumor had gripped my people, to be speculated and commented upon and filed:

“The Cobra poisoned an entire village….”

“The Cobra forced a son to rape his own mother and slit both their throats when the act was complete”

“The Cobra made a man watch as his goons chopped the man’s wife and infant babies into paste.”

“The Cobra put that same man in a cage with the severed heads of his family, hoisted the cage high into a tree, and then set the tree on fire.”

That night was too cold to sleep, and the man spent the darkness watching the hungry fish below them reflect the light of the full moon.

***

July 29th, 2012

The day brought cold. The priest did not speak until after the afternoon chocolate. When he did finally begin, he spoke slowly:

Just before I shut the door to the basement, I instructed my people that I would take to the woods to scout, and that I would return, and not to open the door for anything save my three loud knocks. At that, a young man from the village stood up and insisted that no, he would go into the jungle. He told me to take care of the village. He kissed his daughter, and gave her to the sea of arms reaching up from the moldy cellar. Po Nyu was his name, and he was practically a child himself. His wife - 16 years old at the time - had died giving birth to his child. Suki was her name, the youngest of my people at the time. No more than a few weeks past two years old. I pleaded with this boy Po told him to stay with his family. I tried to close the door, but he wouldn’t be swayed. Just before he ran off into the jungle, he showed me an ancient German pistol he’d hidden under his shirt. He spoke to the priest in the village dialect:

I’ll meet them at the road.

He’d said, with eyes blinking and darting…

Gunfire means they’ve arrived.

And then he was gone, out the front door and into the rubber trees. I visited my office, put on vestments, my cross. If I was to meet uniformed soldiers, I wanted to meet them praying. I was preparing to face them in the sanctuary of my church, when I’d heard it: Gunfire. The dry crack of ancient powder in a petrified weapon. I heard three sharp reports - single shots - right in a row. Then, following that, the indifferent roar of automatic weapons. An assault rifle, and something bigger. I began to pray. I was terrified. Then a new sound - worse than the weaponry. A moan, or a scream, or both, coming from somewhere below me. For a moment I thought the huns were already inside, tracking my people like hounds, and barking out an alert to their unseen masters: WE FOUND THEM.

As I descended the stairs though, the sound rang out again and this time I knew exactly what it was, because I’d heard it earlier and it had never really stopped. It was the cry of a child in need. It was Siki. The child of the volunteer, Po Nyu, his only child. Siki was screaming and crying because she wanted her daddy. She was screaming for Po Nyu.

It was very hot. The sun was full in the sky, and the dew was boiling from the bones of the jungle. The daily symphony of animals, wind, men, and - at dawn - birds, was in full throat when I opened the cellar’s rotted door for the second time that day. But as I stood there staring down in to the moldy darkness, the whole orchestra stopped at once. Silence settled on the jungle like raining mud, and I was near-paralyzed with fear. As I stood there, sweating down on them, two things happened at once. The first was I heard footsteps shuffle across he ceiling above me, one set, steps all out of phase. Our scout, the child’s father, had returned.

The little girl’s shrieking doubled in volume, as if she’d sensed her father’s return. She seemed louder this time, as if she sensed her father’s return and felt his pain. Long, high-pitched screams broadcast from the bowels of the church, punctuated with coughs and snorts.

We heard Po Nyu cross the floor over our heads and start downstairs. In seconds he stood before me, silent, covered from the chest down in bright red blood. His face, his head, I…

And with that, the Priest fell silent once again.

***

July 30,2012

The two men had slept long and well. The Sailor’s first comment on waking was this.

Sharks. There are sharks all around us.

The priest’s eyes opened. The sailor went on:

Offshore in the warm water? Nothing but sharks. They scurry from ships, but smaller craft they investigate. They learn, concentrating with instinctive focus on one simple problem: how best to get at what’s inside.

Cul paused, a few beats, like to let the news sink in…

There are millions of them. All you have to do is look over the side and you can see them. Hundreds and hundreds of hundreds, all sizes, many of them 8,10,12 feet long. So many of them - he said - that it seems the sea around us is composed entirely of the bastards, with only a little water to lubricate their constant motion.If there were another boat come to rescue us they’d need not even throw us a line. We could just jump out and hop on the backs of the sharks, jump across the shark-bridge to safety.

Cul was regarding the priest as he finished, in a way that made Pettine seem uncomfortable. Neither man spoke for the rest of that day.

***

August 1st, 2012:

The Priest took up his story just where he’d left off, as if he’d been telling it right along:

The boy Po had been badly injured, but he’d heard the cries of his daughter and returned to the church. His face was a blood mask, and his left arm hung limply at his side, shredded at the shoulder from automatic weaponry, and useless. Within minutes he’d taken the now-quiet child in his good arm, and beat a quick exit up the stairs. I saw no more of him or his daughter, and I pray every night for their deliverance. I ran as fast as I could into the jungle. I walked to the harbor by night, taking care to avoid the soldiers. I was lucky enough to find the Wendigo, and a captain willing to take me to Sicilly when he sailed. We left Sri Lanka bound for points south, and beyond them, the Mediterainian Sea.

The sailor moved quickly. More quickly, in fact, than the priest would have thought possible. Over the last few weeks he’d watched this man waste and melt in the hated sun until there was nothing left of his but bones covered by a dry, near-translucent wrapper of flesh. Up to that moment, he’d have sworn death was upon his companion, and would do for him before the day was out.

Instead, the priest found himself trussed up and smashed to he floor of the tiny lifeboat. His nose and mouth were submerged in the brown gruel at the “V” of the lifeboat, the sailor was holding it there, grinding it into the wooden hull. The priest could feel tiny splinters piercing his face. The pressure was crushing. It went on and on. 30 seconds, a minute, there was no sound, no wind. A minute thirty. The priest was drowning in two inches of water. Finally the hold broke, and the priest came up gasping and heaving, trying to account for all the lost breath. The Sailor - he found - had tied his arms fast to his sides. The priest was about to say something, but the other man placed a terrible kick to the and the pain shut him up. The kick had burst the holy man‘s nose but he sailor wasn’t finished. He cracked him in the side of the head with a nasty, wholly unexpected right elbow. The priest fell again. His nose was gushing, and the sailor watched it blending with the awful fluid already in the bilge. The priest opened his eyes. Then, whisper-soft, the sailor said:

I’ll have it finished.

And then added:

The truth. Or so help me I ‘ll make an end of this.

The Priest was already talking though. shouting, Imploring, demanding. He seemed to be trying some type of apology. He never bothered with denial:

You cannot understand, they weren’t going to kill me. The Cobra himself told me. He said they’d make me eat my own testicles. He said he’d butcher twenty children in front of me every day. He promised he would. There was NO CHOICE please…Please my friend…

The sailor was already moving. In one motion, he stood, took the priest in two hands, and flung him over the side and into the infested water. The priest’s screaming climbed in pitch, gathering itself in great heaves until it was swallowed. The sailor, standing in the boat, could see the sounding sharks rise and converge to investigate. The sea around the priest began to roil, strobing and heaving with flashes of silver and blue and gold. The sailor made no sound, as the priest came up to regard him, and for a moment there was silence between the two men.

***

July 5th, 2012, a beach in Sri Lanka:

The area is secure General

The soldier spoke to him in English. They were standing in the street outside the Church, the Cobra was holding a small child, a girl no more than three, in his arms. Gunfire, steady and invasive sounding in the deserted silence, had been blasting from inside for ten long minutes, forcing the man to yell to his sit-rep into the face of the Cobra. The firepower went silent though, just as the warlord replied:
Good. When the men finish, leave 30 of them here to garrison the town. We’ll march the rest back to the Jungle when I’m done at the water. And do something with this:

The Cobra handed the girl over to his man, and went to keep his appointment at the beach. He told his guards to stay 50 paces behind him and to stop walking when the streets turned to dunes.

I don’t want the priest to see any of you, but I need to see all of you.

He ordered them in clean, efficient English, then turned on one combat boot-heal, and continued into the sands without waiting for a reply. The air smelled of flowers and gunpowder. The sea, glowing white-blue in front, was mercury-flat, reflecting every shining thing upwards.

***

The Cobra found his brother still in his holy vestments, standing at water’s edge, but the Cobra stopped at the tideline where the sand fell away a few feet. He looked down on the scene for a few minutes before speaking, this time in the language of their family:

It’s magic here. Just like always.

His brother did not turn, but spoke his reply to the ocean before him:

Like always, brother, until you.

His brother as usual, thought the Cobra, finding no great trouble giving voice to his own hippocracy. His voice got quieter coming back:

Like always, and now still. What man here can ever move the work of God?

The priest scoffed back:

There is no God here, dear brother. Not in some time. Your men have done away with any man or God foolish enough to claim this place.

The Cobra turned his voice to an evil, impatient whisper:

Well then, perhaps it’s best we’re both leaving. Two million dollars should buy you a happier ending.

There was more silence then, and during the silence both men realized they’d rather not be having this conversation. The Cobra reached into his pocket, pulled out a plain white envelope. He held it up over his head and spoke:

This is the end of it Jason. Come have it, and then run from here, as fast as you can.

Jason Pettine turned at this, and started moving back towards his brother.

***

He’d gotten within five feet when three things happened at almost exactly the same time: First the Cobra’s face burst like a balloon full of red paint, spraying colors, and pieces raining over the Priest’s tunic. Next, the child’s father, Po Nyu rose up from the sands directly behind the dead warlord, still soaking in blood, brandishing an ancient-looking revolver at the Priest, cursing him in three different languages. The third thing: the Cobra’s men sighted the man and spent the next 30 seconds blowing him into a red paste with assault rifles.

The Priest – Jason Pettine was his name – wasted no time. He saw five of his brother’s men sprinting from the top of the beach, converging on his position. Explinations – he felt – would be difficult. Instead he turned and bolted towards the horizon, shedding his tunic and vests as he went. The grey on the horizon was turning to black, and the last thing he saw before diving down and swimming for his life, was a flash of lightening, illuminating, for an instant, the distant borderlands where sky met sea. He was swimming into a storm.

Victory Lap

October, 2001

A coincidence.“ Happenstance”, she called it…

Happenstance.

He said it out loud. It was a good word. Potent, he thought. His wife had used it this morning and he remembered taking great comfort in it. Breakfast was pancakes, the maple syrup scent in an amber cloud around her face. He could still smell it, even in this clinical-smelling waiting room. Had there been other people in the waiting room, they would have known what he had for breakfast straight away. But - of course - the waiting room was empty. That made sense: 8:30 am Saturday was an unusual time for a doctor’s appointment. The doctor had been adamant.

Well not just adamant.

He thought, leafing through an issue of Vogue from 1999.

The guy had insisted. You’d told him you were busy today and the son of a bitch acted as if you hadn’t spoken at all, just went right on. Urgent. That’s the word for it. The guy sounded urgent: “It would be best if you could get in here today, this morning.” What the fuck? The last-ditch was the worst part. First, a blatant fib: You told him you were forty miles out of town. Left for the weekend, “Band business, last minute.” You said it in a tone of voice that you hoped would make an end of it. Pathetic. The guy said: “Tell you what, turn around. I only need you for a few minutes. In and out, you have my word.” Then, by far, the worst part of the conversation. The doctor takes a few beats, lets the phone silence come to a boil and offers a quiet: "please".

Please.

Fuck.

He'd hung up and went to find his wife. She was in the kitchen churning out the pancakes from a stovetop skillet. The story came out of him in a rush, despite his best efforts. He told her about how the doctor had called him at 7:00 am. He told her about the long, urgent sounding voicemail the Doc had left. He told her about how he’d tried to duck the appointment. She’d recieved it all, his wife had, without so much as a second's pause from her pancake-ing. Then came that word:

“Happenstance, babe. He’s probably got plans for later and he just wants to get you taken care of. Lots of doctors keep weekend hours. He’ll have a waiting room full, not just you. Now go so you can come back to me.”

And he felt good. It was instant. His wife said the right things, like always. He was being silly! Worrying at nothing. The pep talk’s lingering effects kept him thinking positive for the twelve minute drive to the doctor’s office. He remained so, not obsessing, examining, or second-guessing the situation until the very moment he turned into the office block. Save for one gleaming 2002 Range Rover - forest green - which he guessed was the Doctor's, the lot was empty. Empty and big. Like a football field, with white lines marking spaces for cars instead of yards. Absurdly, he pulled his Benz into a spot directly adjacent to the Rover.

So much for Saturday hours. You should leave. That’s the move here. You should pull out of this parking lot, grab an unsafe amount of booze, and stalk the cellar until tour starts. A week’s time from right now, you’ll be on the road, safe. On the road.

He didn't leave, didn't even move. He just sat, motionless, stalling for time in the air-conditioned hum of the Benz. Then, incredibly, he was on the move, and before long standing in the the doctor's waiting area. There were magazines. He saw Popular Mechanics, National Geographic, Road and Track. He saw the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Everything would be ok in time, he was sure of it. This thing with his back would clear up, he was certain. The stomach will sort itself out in time, on the road. Safe.

He never even sat down, just bolted for the door. He was extending his hand to the door knob when two things happened at once. The first was that a lava-hot pain bloomed in the space between the small of his back and his belly button. The second was a man dressed in jeans and a blue, short-sleeve tee shirt came shambling into the waiting area and said his name.

The chronic shooting pains in his midsection were a big part of why he’d made this appointment. They’d started almost eight weeks before and he’d found them manageable, most of the time. This one was worse by far, however, than any that had come before. A burning flash in his stomach became a wretched agonizing seizure. The pain radiated out to his skin and within seconds his entire body was consumed by white-hot invisible flames. He felt himself fainting, falling towards the door. He grabbed at the knob, went down to one knee to get his balance and became dimly aware of movement in his peripheral vision. His faculties and processing capacities were overtaken by a flood of pain messages to the brain. The only thing coming across was the suffering and it was morphing, getting worse by the second. The doctor gave him a few beats before moving over to him to assist. He led from behind, steadying him with a hand on his stricken back. They sat together in an examination room. Eventually his rebellious body quieted and he was ready to listen.

appendicitis, 2012

Collage on Paper

12" x 12"

(Album art commission for the Providence, RI based band Point Street Bridge http://www.facebook.com/#!/pointstreetbridge)

Once And Future

Van Halen’s first six records are more important than the entire Led Zeppelin catalog, but not for the reasons you’d expect. Yes, one could make a decent argument that VH served as the hairy end-product of experiments authored by groups like Star, and the New York Dolls. Yes, Eddie Van Halen is an awesome player with a rare and potent set of skills. Yes, the first complete discography in my own record collection was Van Halen, bought with allowance money and including the records Van Halen I, Van Halen II, Women and Children First, Diver Down, Fair Warning, and 1984. These reasons, and many more, are what makes Van Halen awesome. The reasons for the band's importance, however, were won and sealed by an entirely different circumstance.

In 1985 Van Halen fired their lead singer and primary lyricist David Lee Roth, and in doing so, taught thousands of burgeoning eighth grade rock kids that the music doesn’t give a fuck. The Van Halen saga teaches us that rock and roll can disappoint and confuse, and that people who make great music together sometimes hate each other. Van Halen teaches us that art – no matter how deeply we feel we understand it, or how perfect it seems on it’s face – is a thing created by interests and priorities separate from our own. As adults, we know this. For most folks it’s knowledge hard-won from a lifetime's worth of constant disappointment. Children however, especially adolescent children, already testy with hormone flooding aren’t really equipped to deal with something as confusing as this parting was at the time.

Most of my own confusion was that I’d always figured (wrongly) that, despite what the band’s name might imply, David Lee Roth was the leader of Van Halen. He sang and wrote all the songs! He starred in the videos! How – I wondered - can the leader be fired from the band he leads? The rumor mills, unassisted back then by internet-delivered insta-news, were featuring both Gary Cherone and Sammy Hagar as replacement. Those names just added confusion. Cherone was the lead singer of a pop-metal outfit, and Hagar was famous for a novelty song about compulsively disobeying speed limits. David Lee Roth had a fucking samurai sword! He could leap in the air five feet in the execution of perfect spinning windmill kicks, in rhythm, while singing, and screaming. I cannot express to you the unholy weirdness involved in the full realization of this break-up. The word “surreal” springs to mind. If Led Zeppelin had fired Robert Plant in ‘71 and replaced him with Neal Sedaka, and then gone on to record and tour with Sedaka for the next twelve years, only to switch from Sedaka to Paul Anka and tour with him another five years, then we might have some sort of credible precedent on the books. I got in two separate fights over this at school, one of them marking the termination of a three-year best friendship.

Time moved on. Roth set out with a solo act featuring legendary shredder Steve Vai, and deploying a concert stage big enough to contain four NBA regulation-sized basketball courts and a more traditionally-sized arena rock stage. The Van Halen bros. actually ended up hiring Cherone and Hagar (not at the same time, although that would have been awesome) and spent the 90’s following an effective album & single & world tour & nine month hiatus & nine month rehab hiatus & twelve month hiatus hiatus protocol behind music that sounded almost nothing like it had in the days of Roth. During downtime, the Van Halens kept busy ripping DLR in music magazines.

For his part, Diamond Dave actually kind of sunk into obscurity. Even just reading back that sentence the idea seems impossible, yet I watched it happen. This man was the most visible, most awesome, most absolutely sicko rock star of his time. He helped codified the rules of dress and behavior for lead vocalists / front men of the post-classic rock period. If David Lee Roth isn’t David Lee Roth between 1975 and 1985, Then Vince Neal, Mike Patton, Anthony Kiedis, and Perry Farrell never get to be exactly who they became.

Eventually Roth’s solo career lost all Van Halen-related inertia. By the time Kurt Cobain was dead, David Lee Roth was but the answer to a trivia question. Every so often there was some drama: a “drug bust” (he was arrested buying a tiny bag of weed in Washington Square) in 1998, a rumored near-reunion with Van Halen in ‘96, and - in what seemed at the time an inspired spasm of stunt casting – a brief run on terrestrial radio replacing Howard Stern in New York City A.M. drive. The show lasted little more than a week. Roth sank into has-been-ness yet again until his re-acceptance back into the VH fold in early 2007.

The lesson this shit-show seems to teach us is not important enough to justify the action itself. If there’s a bright spot, it’s that Roth – through all his post-VH trial and strife – has seemingly managed to keep his instrument in performance-shape despite his wanderings. Eddie and Alex Van Halen seem game as well, although they never had to endure the extended breaks from touring that Roth was forced to wait out. There are tour dates about to be released, and a new VH record dropped two weeks ago, the first to feature Diamond Dave in many a moon. I have not heard it, but I’m sure it's awesome, as most of the things the Roth-led VH does are. If it’s not, however, there are always those first six records. They sound the same wild alarm they always did. They sound like drinking underage in secret parking lots. They sound like fucking in the back seat of a moving car. They sound like being totally, wickedly, young.